HARSH DISCIPLINE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume v, Issue 232, 12 October 1877, Page 15

HARSH DISCIPLINE.

The following has been elicited by the enquiry into the cause of the suicide of the boy Gibbs, a late pupil of Christ's Hospital, London :—: — The Rev. Andrew Drew, incumbent of St. Antnolin's, Nnnhcad, says that the seven years he spent at the school were such years of misery that nothing would induce him to send sons of his own there. I dare say (he observes) that old Etonians who remember what a birching from Hawtrey was will laugh at the idea of a boy hanging himself to avoid a flogging, but only old Bluecoat boys know what a Christ's Hospital flogging is. Fortunately I was never flogged myself, but as long as I live I shall never forget a scene that I witnessed in the case of another boy who had been flogged. He was a small and delicate lad, by name Blount, and he slept in the bed next to me. A big boy had compelled Blount to go and bring him some lumps of sugar out of the monitor's sugar-basin. The big boy ate the sugar himself, and the small boy had none of it. The facts of the ease became known to the monitor, who reported it to the steward, who flogged Blount as a thief, and did not punish the big boy, That night poor little Blount could not sleep, and at last he begged me to help him. I accordingly took his shirt off, and found his back, from the shoulders down to the waist, one mass of lacerated flesh, the blood sticking to the shirt so as to cause agony in getting it off. I then, with my finger and thumb, pulled out of his back at least a dozen pieces of birch-rod, which had penetrated deep into the flesh. That boy's back looked more like a piece of raw meat than anything else, I have since seen the back of a sailor after three dozen with a naval cat, and I solemnly declare that the injury done to the sailor's back would not compare with that done to the Bluecoat boy." There was a minor punishment of which Mr. Drew can speak from experience. " Six cuts with a cane," he says, " was an ordinary punishment, and in the case of most of the masters and the steward each cut raised a long blood blister, which took weeks before it went away. I was once being caned by a master who was an adept in the art of injuring boys' hands, and I saved myself the remainder of a caning, by the following plan : — After receiving the first cut on my right hand, and while in the act of receiving the Becond, I purposely dug my sail into the blood blister which the cane had made on my hand, so that when I held up my right hand for the third cut it was all over blood, and the master let me off the rest, as he could scarcely go on after, as he thought, cutting my hand open. Looking back on the transaction, I see, of course, that I was wrong to make my own hand bleed to save myself the rest of the punishment ; but my contention is that such a thing should be impossible, and it would not be possible except in the case of too great violence being used. My own opinion is that poor little Gibbs has been " done to death " bj the bullying and flogging and the fear of more to come.